Our goal is to make it easier to sustain open source projects.

Today, most of the value created by open source software is captured by companies. Many would love to give back, but they can't give money to individuals or to unincorporated projects.

That's why we have created the Open Source Collective as an umbrella organization. We provide legal infrastructure to open source projects around the world, so backers and sponsors can easily support them financially.

When you join the Open Source Collective, you can focus on your project and let us take care of accounting, taxes, invoices, etc.

We are the fiscal host for over 1,000 open source projects. If you're an open source maintainer, apply here: https://opencollective.com/opensource/apply

These are our Terms of Fiscal Sponsorship.

What services do you offer?

We make it easy for you to receive and disburse money without having to worry about accounting and invoicing, or setting up your own legal entity.

We coordinate with companies to comply with their purchase order process or invoicing requirements. We have relationships with many large sponsors of open source.

We also advocate for open source sustainability. We organize the Sustain OSS conference, and we build tools such as BackYourStack, to make it easier for companies to understand and support their dependencies.

What types of projects do you accept?

We accept any open source project, in any language, anywhere in the world.

Conditions:

• Operate transparently, so we can see your code and activity.
• Have an open source license for your project.
• Have some social proof that your project is legitimate and active.

If you are using Github and you have a least 2 core contributors and 100 stars, then your Collective will be automatically approved. If not, please reach out and give us more details about your project so we can manually approve you.

What payment methods do you support?

We accept credit cards, via Stripe, through the platform automatically. We also support wire transfers and cheques for large donations. Please contact us for details.

We pay out expenses and invoices via Paypal. We can arrange for payment by other means for special circumstances, such as countries that do not have Paypal, or very large amounts.

How much does it cost?

TL;DR: 10% + payment processor fees.

There is 5% fiscal hosting fee to cover all the accounting and admin. On top of that, there is also the 5% platform fee charged by Open Collective for use of the software. When paying out expenses, PayPal also charges a fee.

Why not self-host my Collective?

You can if you want! But if you don't operate a legal entity, it will be it very hard for companies to support you. Operating a legal entity and dealing with taxes is a burden many don't want. If you do have a legal entity, you can become a fiscal host yourself and take advantage of Open Collective's features and transparency.

However, if most of your donations won't be in USD, or will be small donations from individuals instead of companies, then fiscal hosting by the Open Source Collective might not be right for you.

Who is behind the Open Source Collective?

The Open Source Collective was initiated by the same people who started Open Collective, but it is a seperate legal entity with its own mission and identity specifically about supporting Open Source (while Open Collective in general supports all kinds of communities). It's a 501(c)(6) non-profit based in the US.

Our board:

• Alanna Irving, executive director, Open Source Collective
• Pia Mancini, CEO and co-founder, Open Collective
• Henry Zhu, core maintainer, Babel
• Justin Dorfman, MOSS, SustainOSS & StackShare
• Sean Larkin, core team, Webpack
• Benjamin Nickolls co-founder, Octobox

More questions?

Send us an email ([email protected]) or tweet us @opencollect.